Tag Archives: scoliosis

Today marks week 20 of my pregnancy. Halfway there. The time has both flown and dragged by so slowly, and it has not at all been what I imagined it would be. This was to be my first truly active pregnancy. With my first two, I walked a lot, but that was about it. This was my first pregnancy as a runner, and I confess I harbored some dreams about documenting all the fabulous running I’d be doing while growing this child.

But my body, and my life, had other plans. I got pregnant pretty fresh off Hood to Coast, when I was badly injured and did little more than hobble from exchange to exchange. I then decided to rest the injury as much as possible before Ragnar Tennessee, and even then ran the fewest number of miles possible. I made it through, and just under the wire of first trimester feel-good time. I was juuuuuust starting to get tired but hadn’t started feeling nauseous yet–which was awesome given my usual relay insomnia, and the fact that my stomach was not yet turning when I was stuck in a van with a large number of sweaty people.

The next six weeks brought some pretty major upheaval in my home life as a series of events prompted us to, quite suddenly, decide to put our house on the market. I consciously forewent school, friends, and exercise to pack up a good deal of the house and move it into storage. Then came the deep cleaning and then, Thanksgiving and eight days of family in from out of town. Even if I had not been in the first trimester of pregnancy, I think I’d have still been exhausted. I tried to run a time or two, but my IT band was still horribly cranky, and I could not work up the energy to get myself out of the house and to BodyPump. I told myself this was a time to rest, to give up the old routines, and that if I needed to start back at zero after the baby, it would be fine–especially if my IT band would heal.

Then, mid-December, the perfect storm of stressful events hit. We got a contract on the house. I spent several days house-shopping so we’d be prepared to make an offer on a new place. Found one house, one beautiful, perfect house, where I could practically see my children growing up and coming back to visit, where envisioned high schoolers packed in for Bible studies, where I imagined my parents and in-laws coming for joyous holidays. With all the house-shopping and preparing for the holidays, I again made the choice to let the exercise, for the most part, go. I knew I was feeling a little more blue than normal, and a little heavier, but I told myself it was nothing I couldn’t deal with.

Three days before Christmas, the couple buying our house pulled out of the deal. We mourned the loss, celebrated the holiday with family in from out-of-town, and then a week after the house deal fell through, my brother-in-law, who is like a brother to me, ended up in the ER and then the ICU 350 miles away from where I live. I went up the day after New Year’s to help him and my sister.

That’s when my body piped up with a very serious message for me: NOT KEEPING MY BODY STRONG IS NOT OKAY. The day after I arrived I developed a near-constant, and nearly debilitating, ache in the right side of my upper back. It hurt to sit. It hurt to stand. The only relief came when I was lying down, and even then only truly felt better if I could sleep and fully relax. I haven’t had back pain like that since I was working full-time in TV, producing hour-long shows in an extremely stressful shop–when I was also heavier and not putting in any time to speak of on working and strengthening my back and my core.

YET STILL. My first instinct was not to go back to working out. I was out of the habit by this time, and frankly, I had already forgotten the good emotional feelings you get when your physical body is working. I was intimidated, ashamed, and worried that I couldn’t handle how much my fitness had surely declined. So I went and got a massage instead. And in the discussion during that session, my personal-trainer-turned-massage-therapist and I decided that the main culprit was my neglect of my core, and the only way to rid myself of this knot (which was, the massage therapist said, bigger than Stone Mountain) was to get rid of my new gym-fear and get back to working out.

Monday, January 13, I took a deep breath and opened the door to the gym. I went four times in the next five days. I couldn’t lift as much, I couldn’t run as far, and all of it was painful. But by the weekend, my back only spoke out at the end of the day, when I was tired anyway. I kept going, focusing on my abs and my back for strength, and running to give me the endorphins and motivation to want to keep going back. Within two weeks, the pain was virtually gone, and now, at almost three weeks back, I am once again in the habit.

So, lesson learned: I am a person who, probably due to the scoliosis, would be a chronic pain case within weeks of not staying in shape. And with that pain would come irritability, impatience, and a loss of many of the good qualities I work hard to cultivate. And yet within just days of making the very conscious decision to take charge again, experienced a complete turn around in my wellness, both physically and mentally. Health and fitness maintenance is not a luxury. It is essential to maintain any sort of quality of life. The fact that I let myself get into such a fog, denying that reality, is shocking to me. I’m grateful that I got in and out of it relatively quickly. I’m writing all of this down because I don’t ever want to go to that place again. I may look bizarre when I’m even further along in this pregnancy and lifting weights or working my core, but whoever wants to judge can go right ahead. I’ll be too happy at being pain-free to notice.

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Scoliosis. I hate it. Hence why I don’t post about it a lot. But it’s one of the reasons I started this blog, and it is a question I get a lot, especially from Google searches.

So.

Q: Can I run with scoliosis?

A: Yes. Probably. Maybe. I think. I hope.

I’m not a doctor or a chiropractor or anything resembling an expert on anything except my own experience. Obviously I’ve been able to run a lot and not had any problems. I hope if you’re reading this that you are too.

My body is basically very high needs because of my spine. I always seem to be fighting some weird muscle imbalance, and I do a lot of pre-habbing of my body to keep it from getting into Injury-Land. I handle my scoliosis in five ways, with the goal being to keep running well into my life (like, all of it):

1. I stretch a LOT. Because my spine is twisty, it pulls on certain muscles, very hard. So, I’m pretty much always tight, somewhere. It makes it hard to sleep. I wake up super tight. I like to stretch/do yoga/whatever you want to call it in the morning. Sometimes I don’t make it a priority, and I feel it.

2. I get massage. I used to think this was a frou-frou Ladies Who Lunch kind of thing, but not so anymore. I get the painful, deep tissue kind, and it helps. It also hurts. A lot. But, worth it. Get a recommendation from an athlete who is a believer in sports massage. Then, be vocal in your massage about what you need. I go about once a month in non-training cycles and 2x a month when I’m training harder. I try to go on Monday after a Saturday long run. In between massage, I will foam roll or use The Stick, a tennis ball or even a wall to get what feels tight.

3. I keep my weight down (ish). I weigh a good deal more than I look like I weigh (not tellin’), but a lot less than I used to weigh, which is when I had actual pain from scoliosis. I was also working a desk job then, so not sure how much posture played into that. Running obviously has a lot to do with that. So does nutrition (they say you can’t outrun a bad diet). And you better believe that weight training does too, since muscle keeps your metabolism firing. My theory: the less weight you carry on a crooked structure, the better your crooked structure (and everything attached to it) will function.

4. I keep my core strong. This has been crucial. Right now I’ve slacked on my core work since the gym where I do BodyPump has cancelled the core class I went to for three years. I need to get it back in there, because 5 minutes twice a week for BodyPump ain’t cutting it. I like 8 minute abs cause it’s fast, good, and the outfits the guy wears are awesome. Trust me. But I’m open to suggestions, if you have a quick abs workout you like please let me know. Oh, and by ‘abs’ I mean ‘everything from your chest to the tops of your legs, front and back.’ CORE. I would love to do more pilates but it hasn’t worked out for my schedule or my wallet… yet.

5. I see a chiropractor. Every week. It’s just something I do, like running. My chiropractor and I are very close. She’s been at my house on Christmas; I photographed her wedding. My thought is: I want things to be lined up as much as possible within the limits of my wonky spine. Her goal is: No further curviness or degneration.

If you have scoliosis, and want to run, more than anything–be patient. Accept that your body may or may not be on a remedial running journey. Be open to new things–new shoes, new therapies, changes to your form. I find running works way better for me than the elliptical or the bike because it doesn’t expect my body to be symmetrical. So far, running seems to have very few expectations of me, and I love it for that.

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After I registered for Rock N Roll USA, I waited for quite some time (for me) to announce it to the world (well, the Facebook world). Partly because, well, it’s a scary thing to tell friends you don’t know that well that you’re planning to do something kinda big. Some of them will call you nuts, some will give you that condescending “Better you than me” line, some will just silently wait for you to fail (and y’all all know that that happens.” But really, I didn’t so much want to tell anyone because there was a time when I said, often and loudly, “I’ll never run a full marathon! I’m a happy half-marathoner and I can’t see every wanting to do twice the distance!”

Well, never say never, I guess. Something happened after my last 1/2, in October. I just kept running. I didn’t really want to take a long break afterward, I wanted to be out in the cooler weather, and I slowly, almost accidentally started building my base. And that happened at the BEGINNING of my best running season. I am a cold weather girl, and in Georgia I feel like the best running weather STARTS in December. It just started to make since that if I ever wanted to do one, know was the time. I was healthy, and also had started to understand, through a long process of being semi-injured, what I need to do to stay healthy. (For me it’s: More stretching. More foam rolling. More massage. Basically, more after-care.) I toyed with waiting till spring 2013 (I don’t want to train in the sweltering Southern summer for a full) but who knows what might happen in a year? So I found a Saturday marathon in an area I’d love to explore by foot, and found a friend who wanted to both run it, train it, and travel to it with me. It just seemed to be the right time.

It just seemed right.

Here are my current answers to my own earlier objections.

1. I’ll get burnt out on running. That objection was one that I developed back when I didn’t really *love* running. I loved the benefits, I loved the shrinking nature of my posterior… but I didn’t love the activity itself. I also didn’t realize how seasonal running can be, how nice it is to take a bit of well-deserved time off after a big event. I get all of those things now. I LOVE running. I also know that if I get a little tired of running, I can head for the bike and be fine. I’ve also learned that whole thing about resting making you stronger.

2. I can’t do it, I have that scoliosis thing. This is still a concern, but I feel ready to try. So far my scoliosis hasn’t affected my running at all, as far as I know. And my weekly mileage is still not over-the-top. So Imma go for it while I can.

3. I’ll run my body into the ground and won’t be able to run when I’m older. My highest-mileage weeks on my training plan will be only about 7-8 miles higher than what I was running in early December. Not that big of a jump.

I guess what’s really happened is I’ve just grown as a runner over the last couple of years. And this just doesn’t seem like an unreachable goal. My views on it have definitely evolved as I’ve become a more seasoned runner.

Bottom line: All my excuses are gone! What’s a girl to do?

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